Marriage à La Möbius

A début novel examines the dark side of matrimony.

It’s probably a safe bet that a novel about a video-game designer that opens with a detailed description of an ingenious video game will somehow find a way to have its characters reënact that game. In Adam Ross’s lively, intermittently moving, and exhaustingly clever début novel, “Mr. Peanut” (Knopf; $25.95), the designer in question is a successful thirty-something New Yorker called David Pepin, a man whose professional achievements stand in contrast to his domestic troubles: he’s losing the thread of his relationship with his obese wife, Alice, whose ongoing struggle with numerous diets serves as a pointed metaphor for marriage. (“The middle is long and hard. . . . It’s like holding your breath longer than you think you can.”) The video game in question is a mind-bender suggestively called Escher Exit, in which an avatar moves through cunningly designed “environments” in preparation for a “final confrontation” with an evil archenemy named Mobius. As the novel proceeds, this game also starts to look a lot like matrimony.

Or, at least, the dark side of matrimony, in which “the proximity of violence and love” is so great that the two become hard to tell apart. The novel’s interest in the bizarre ambivalences to which intimacy can lead is clear from the opening page, where a catalogue of David’s homicidal fantasies—“He bludgeoned her, he suffocated her with a pillow”—yields seamlessly to a scene of him and Alice making furious love in a parked car. Its interest in narrative gamesmanship becomes clear a few pages later, when one of David’s macabre fantasies seems to come true: the highly allergic Alice dies after consuming, or being forced to consume, a handful of peanuts. David, the chief suspect in the ensuing investigation, protests his innocence even as more and more damning evidence comes to light. The mystery isn’t solved until the very end of “Mr. Peanut,” in a scene that—as you always knew it would—replays the final level of Escher Exit.

Whatever tricks David may be playing, it’s clear that Ross has a few up his sleeve. From the start, there are clues that, on one level, this book has been designed as a kind of postmodern fun house, filled with distorted reflections of pop-culture icons. A tough nurse at the school where Alice teaches is named Thelma Ritter (the actress who played the nurse in “Rear Window”); one of the detectives on the Pepin case is none other than Sam Sheppard, the suspect in the infamous nineteen-fifties wife-bludgeoning case (which many believe inspired the nineteen-sixties TV series “The Fugitive”); and—trickiest of all, perhaps—the opening lines of a novel that David has been surreptitiously writing in order to alleviate his marital ennui turn out to be identical to the opening lines of “Mr. Peanut” itself. This last ploy mischievously makes the reader’s reality increasingly difficult to distinguish from the novel’s.

Ross’s playful, if sometimes heavy-handedly self-referential gestures—Escher, he reminds you, was an artist who “invited and then thwarted your efforts to grasp the whole, at the same time making you feel trapped”—suggest a larger and more serious point. If “Mr. Peanut” is something of a Möbius strip, Ross seems to be saying, then so is a marriage: in both fiction and relationships one “side” can turn out to be the same as the other—love and hate, form and content, art and life, past and present. The disorienting way that opposites attract and even collapse into each other haunts Ross’s novel at every level, from a casual description of a standoff between David and Alice as “something absurd and useless, a pointless exertion of stamina, like a kissing marathon,” to broader statements. “It was odd,” David muses, “how marriage flattened time, compressed it, hid its passing, time past and time present looping on each other, foreground gone background and back, until the new was the same as the old and the past impossibly novel and strange.”

The ingenious compression, concealment, and looping architecture in “Mr. Peanut” will doubtless win it many admirers. But it’s hard not to feel that all this form ultimately works against the book’s true content. The structural and emotional core of “Mr. Peanut” turns out to be a wonderful extended set piece re-creating the married life of Sam Sheppard, which ended—or perhaps culminated—in the murder of his pregnant wife, Marilyn, on July 4, 1954. The date is one whose symbolism Ross is understandably happy to exploit. The Sheppards were an all-American couple living in a Cleveland suburb—he a successful physician, she an ostensibly model wife and mother who still played a mean game of tennis—but they also had all-American problems, of which Sam’s serial adulteries were the most obvious symptom. (At the conclusion of his sensational trial—another bit of Americana—Sheppard was convicted; he was later acquitted at a second trial.)

With tremendous imaginative sympathy, Ross brings the Sheppards’ mid-century, comfortably Middle American milieu to life, evoking both its casual beauties—“When the wind rustled the leaves by their second-story window, it felt as if their house was a boat setting sail”—and the fissures that lay beneath. (He gets just right the men’s offhand way of referring to their wives as “girls.”) Even more remarkable, he takes a pair of near-iconic historical figures and turns them into persuasive literary characters. Marilyn, in particular, is given a rich inner life, which reminds you that men aren’t the only ones whose emotional lives run on the parallel tracks of love and violence. (During a dinnertime spat, she watches her husband garnish a hot dog: “Along its length he ran lines of mustard and ketchup and mayo and relish as carefully as if he were laying brick. A brick, Marilyn thought, would come in handy right now.”) By the end of this section, Ross has shaped the facts of the Sheppard case into a psychologically acute and structurally coherent novella—an American tragedy in which love reawakens too late. There’s a moment, arresting in its simplicity, that unexpectedly and movingly caps the history of Sam’s philandering: entangled with a wearyingly needy mistress, he experiences a realization that Marilyn is the only person who’s ever given him “joy”—an emotion that, unlike excitement, only true intimacy can produce.

The problem is that the Sheppard material is so strong that everything else in the book seems contrived—at once overwrought and vacant. (Not least because David and Alice are themselves curiously substanceless: characters into whom dissatisfactions have been poured.) A lengthy flashback set in Hawaii, which provides the key to Alice’s manic overeating and culminates in a gamelike combat of wills during a hiking trip, leaves you with the glazed-eyed lassitude you get after playing too many rounds on the Xbox 360. I was surprised to read that Ross was inspired to write his book after hearing a story about a fat relative who died after eating a handful of peanuts; the finished novel had me thinking that he had always wanted to write about the Sheppard case and had finally arrived at the right moment to do it—and then, not trusting the strength of his story, gussied it up with fashionable stylistic gimmicks.

These grow tiring, in the end, not least because the debutant author too often rushes in to show how it all works, to explain his themes by connecting the dots for you. (“The middle, David wrote, is long and hard. He meant his book and he meant his marriage.”) This anxiousness reaches a climax that coincides with that of the novel itself. During a final, awkwardly emphatic flashback to David and Alice’s first meeting, in a college class about “Marriage and Hitchcock” (get it?), there’s a transcription of the professor’s opening lecture that not only needlessly re-states familiar themes (“Can marriage save your life, or is it just the beginning of a long double homicide?”) but also explains how the parts of the novel link up:

So when David looked back, this time in their lives was itself a montage, images from these films and the Sheppard murder crosscut with his memories of Alice and of falling in love, and he often thought of Hitchcock’s work and the Sheppard crime as being a part of their DNA—a braided filament that augured their fate.

Early in the novel, Ross describes David’s work in progress in terms clearly meant to evoke “Mr. Peanut”: “The structure was complex, perhaps overly so, but the story was impossible to tell straight.” I’m not so sure. In the end, Ross may be a bit too much like the hero of his protagonist’s video game—a nice guy haunted by an impishly destructive doppelgänger. The heart of this novel is the work of a writer with a strong natural talent who has chosen an old-fashioned subject (bourgeois marriage) and mastered an old-fashioned technique of bringing that subject to life (an emotionally observant realism). But the novel’s self-congratulatory cleverness suggests the lurking presence of another kind of writer, one in thrall to a modish and ultimately vacuous gamesmanship. After reading “Mr. Peanut,” you very much hope that the former will be strong enough to prevail in the final confrontation with the latter. ♦

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Daniel Mendelsohn is the author of seven books, including “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture” and “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.” He teaches at Bard College.